51 Turbaco is a volcanic region of Colombia; air volcanoes are gas vents, which emit gas and mud more-or-less continuously but rarely suffer explosive eruptions.
52 The French equivalent of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
53 I have translated the names of these French children’s games directly into English; the latter is an elimination game bearing some slight resemblance to the English game “Simon Says.” They are, of course, ludicrously ill-fitted for gambling purposes.
54 When Jules Verne refers to a neutral point between the terrestrial and lunar “zones of attraction” in Autour de la lune, he is careful to observe that he is simplifying a situation that is actually more complicated, not only because the Earth and Moon are in constant relative motion, but because the Sun’s gravitational attraction is by no means trivial in Earth’s orbit; Graffigny and Le Faure are not as scrupulous, and thus permit themselves to design and develop an impossible situation. They also imitate Verne in assuming that the weight of the space travelers would remain constant until vanishing at the neutral point, even though Ossipoff has already observed that gravitational attraction varies with the square of the distance from the attracting body—an error perpetuated throughout the text.
55 Graffigny gives these names in French; I have chosen to render them straightforwardly into English because a few of the more familiar Latin names are deliberately introduced into the text very shortly, in a calculatedly quirky fashion whose effect would be destroyed if I used the Latin terms here.
56 “Molière’s Latin” is Latin—or nonsense imitative of Latin—used for the purposes of pretension. It derives from a famous speech in Le Médecin malgré lui, in which the fake doctor blinds his client with a nonsensical speech seasoned with every Latin phrase he knows.
57 Graffigny and his characters are, of course, assuming that the Moon’s craters are volcanic rather than impact craters—an assumption that colors much of their subsequent discussions of the surface features of the satellite.
58 Franz von Gruithuisen (1774-1852) published his “discovery” of a city north of Schröter crater in 1824, naming it Wallwerk. Subsequent observers armed with better telescopes could find no trace of it. The next reference on this list remains stubbornly obscure.
59 Joseph Johann von Littrow (1781-1840).
60 The French pronoun used to refer to the Selenite is ambiguous, potentially translatable as “he” or “it.” As the physical description contains no reference to sexual organs, the neutral term might be preferable on logical grounds, but subsequent developments leave no doubt that the authors are assuming that the Selenites have two sexes, as human do, and that those showing initiative are male.
61 The notion that there might be worlds in which eating is unnecessary (because alimentation could be achieved by breathing) is one of Camille Flammarion’s frequent preoccupations, reflected in Lumen and elsewhere. It is always coupled in his works with the conviction that the inhabitants of other worlds might not bear the slightest physical resemblance to Earthly life, having been adapted by evolution to very different physical environments.
62 The reader might think it odd that Fricoulet does not seem curious as to how the shell’s passengers were removed from the crashed shell to the cage, if it was not by the Selenites—who would, in that case, know already that it was the means by which the strangers had arrived—and why they were removed to that location. The question is never addressed, let alone answered, when communication with the Selenites is eventually opened.
63 The reference is to two of the standard texts used in the French educational system, Abbé Charles-François Lhomond’s Latin manual De viris illustribus (1775) and Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1877).
64 The text refers to the Earth, presumably employing a deliberately crude translation of a Selenite term, as Tournante [rotating], adapting the adjective as a noun. “Revolver” has acquired unfortunate connotations in English, but still seems more appropriate in context than “Turning” or “Spinning,” whose noun versions also have awkwardly inapposite meanings.
65 Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (1816-1892) was an early expert in celestial photography; he donated his collection to Columbia University, where its cream is still displayed.
66 The term the authors actually use is “montagnes russes,” which is now used in France as a generic term for roller-coasters, although the original “Russian mountain” ride—which caused a sensation in Paris in the early years of the 19th century—was more like a helter-skelter, with a continuous but somewhat tortuous descent. Fricoulet’s subsequent description is, indeed, more reminiscent of a roller-coaster, although it is exceedingly hard to believe that frictional losses in speed would be as minimal as he seems to think.
67 In Parisian slang, “X” is the Ecole Polytechnique—one of the two colleges specializing in practical arts that Gontran has just sneeringly cited—while “un X” is one of its students, “Monsieur X” one of its graduates and “les X” mathematics.
68 This term (Subvolves in French), introduced into the text abruptly and without explanation, is derived from John Kepler’s classic Somnium, published posthumously in 1634, which describes a visionary lunar voyage in which the side of the Moon facing the Earth is named Subvolva and the far side Privolva. Kepler’s hypothetical account of lunar biology, although very sketchy, is more sophisticated intellectually than Graffigny’s; no 19th century writer contrived to surpass its logical acumen, although Verne and Flammarion were capable of similar imaginative ingenuity.
69 As in his account of his own flying-machine, Fricoulet seems not to understand the actual principle of jet propulsion, confusing his correct attribution of the impulse to the reaction against the expulsion of gas with an incorrect suggestion that a rocket is “pushing against the air” in a manner somehow analogous to a kite. Flammarion knew better, although his accurate calculation of the escape velocity necessary to escape the grip of terrestrial gravity inhibited him from suggesting that jet propulsion might be adequate to its achievement. André Mas, writing in Paris in 1913, was similarly dubious; like the English popularizer of science John Munro—whose theoretical account of the possibilities of space travel in A Trip to Venus (1897) includes consideration of a “compound cannon” not unlike Ossipoff’s—Mas thought that rockets would only become practicable as a means of propulsion once a vessel was actually in space.
70 As the earlier chapters of the narrative make clear, the Panama Canal was not operational when the novel was written, but Ferdinand de Lesseps had already begun work on it in 1881, so it was a celebrated work in progress; it was eventually completed in 1914.
71 The reference is to the famous critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711).
72 Warren de la Rue (1815-1889) was the first significant pioneer of celestial photography, although his endeavors were soon outshone by Rutherfurd’s. Angelo Secchi (1818-78) was far more significant as an observer of stars than he was as a lunar photographer.
73 The amateur astronomer Arthur Stanley Williams (1861-1938).
74 This mock-Latin phrase used to be employed in France as a comically pretentious way of saying “on foot.”
75 The three named objects are all craters and the height attributed to them is entirely illusory; as with many other craters mentioned in the text, Graffigny’s mistaken conviction that they are volcanic turns them into mountains.
76 Le Petit Navire [The Little Ship], also known as La Courte Paille [The Short Straw] is a seamen’s ballad whose French version dates back at least as far as the 16th century. Versions of it exist in most other European languages; the British one, The Ship in Distress, was recorded by several 20th century folk singers, including Ewan MacColl. Its central motif, in which shipwreck victims draw straws to determine which of them will be killed and eaten to keep the others alive, is an enduring item of maritime mythology, often exploited or satirized in popular fiction. Like some modern urban legends, it gave rise to actual cases of im
itative behavior.
77 Johann Schmidt (1824-1878) made the cited claim while compiling a detailed lunar map, first completed in 1868 and improved in 1874. It was based on comparisons of his own observations with earlier lunar maps made by Johann Mädler (1794-1874) and Wilhelm Lohrmann (1796-1840) in the 1830s—although Lorhmann’s map was only published posthumously, in a version edited by Schmidt. Mädler and his sponsor William Beer had been adamant that the moon’s face was unchanging, and Schimdt was enthusiastic to prove them wrong, but later observers have mostly attributed the discrepancy between the maps to observer error.
78 Etienne Leopold Trouvelot (1827-1895) was an artist who made many drawings of celestial objects.
79 The German astronomer Hermann Klein (1844-1914), a prominent member of the Selenographic Society.
80 The reader might think it odd that Sharp did not think of this before, when he was enthusiastic to open the door and step outside. The authors appear to have forgotten that they inserted a reference to the breathing apparatus carried by both space vessels into the earlier scene featuring Sharp and Voriguin
81 Edmund Neison (1849-1940).
82 Jacques Offenbach’s light opera about the incident that sparked to Trojan War, La Belle Hélène, which had a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, opened at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris in December 1864, with the slightly long-in-the-tooth Hortense Schneider playing the eponymous heroine. The fact that Gontran appears to have seen Mlle. Schneider playing the role adds some slight confusion to the story’s chronology; we have been told that he was “25 or 26” when the story began, in March 1881, so he can only have been a child in 1864.
83 The reference is to the central character of one of Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tales; the story is usually known in English as “Hop o’my Thumb,” although the English version of the folktale that Perrault adapted is more familiar as “Tom Thumb.”
84 The four individuals cited here are Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), William Herschel (1738-1822), Jérome Lalande (1732-1807) and Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811). Their dates provide a striking illustration of the obsolescence of Ossipoff’s opinion. The only relatively recent observation he cites in this speech, credited to Grower in 1865, is stubbornly obscure. As the argument progresses, it retreats even further in time, to the opinions of the pioneering lunar map-maker Johannes Helvelius (1629-1696).
85 A contemptuous Latin insult, somewhat akin to “Riff-raff!”
86 The reference is presumably to the prolific composer of popular music Benjamin Godard (1849-1895).
87 The chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1887) invented a manufacturing process for beef extract and set up the Liebig Extract of Meat Company (Lemco) to exploit it. Initially marketed as a viscous liquid, the extract was also produced in a soluble solid form frequently carried by 19th century explorers. It is still familiar in England as the basic ingredient of Bovril and the Lemco-trademarked Oxo cube.
88 It is not obvious these improvisations would work, or that Ossipoff’s calculation makes sense. If the attraction imparted by the photophilic mineral is a force analogous to gravity or electromagnetism, then it would impart a constant acceleration rather than a constant velocity, which would increase markedly as the vehicle got closer to the Sun; even if there were some reason to suppose that increasing the exposed surface area would bring about a proportional increase in the force acting on the craft, switching that surface for a plain black one would surely only result in the substitution of a constant velocity maintained by momentum for the former acceleration, certainly not a change in direction. This facilitating invention was not without influence, however; a similar photophilic substance plays a key role in Octave Jonquel and Théo Varlet’s L’Epopée martien (1921-22; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as The Martian Epic).
89 This injunction, borrowed from the Latin mass, translates as “lift up your hearts!”
90 Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) introduced many instruments of chemical analysis still in use, especially those related to the isolation and measurement of gases.
91 William Nicholson (1753-1815), assisted by Anthony Carlisle (1768-1842), electrolyzed water into its component gases within a matter of months of building his own version of a Voltaic pile, thus pioneering a vital technique in chemical analysis.
92 The authors’ casual reference to procédés connus [familiar methods] is disingenuous. The advent of organic chemistry had informed 19th century scientists that foodstuffs were mostly composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and the notion of synthesizing food from those elements by chemical methods was commonplace in French scientific romance, having been advertised as a likely future triumph of science by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot. Le Faure and Graffigny were not to know that the entire 20th century would elapse without any technological substitute for the ingenuity of plant photosynthesis being discovered, but they are still overreaching vastly in regarding the problem as easily soluble, just as they are in casually describing lunar “water” as “oxygenated” (although the proportional formula sketched out is not that of hydrogen peroxide, which is poisonous). The reader might be tempted to wonder what resources Selenite organic chemistry might have provided for the castaways, had Ossipoff bothered to investigate it.
93 The liquefaction of oxygen and nitrogen, let alone their solidification, requires far more technical sophistication than a “compression pump,” as Graffigny must surely have known. On the other hand, the reader might wonder, here and elsewhere in the narrative, why the characters become desperate with hunger after such brief periods of starvation.
94 Given that the deadliest organic poisons and the most nutritious aliments are made up of exactly the same elements, this cry of “impossible!” seems a trifle overstated.
95 There is an untranslatable play on words here; the verb brûler [to burn] is also used metaphorically to mean “to overshoot.”
96 It is impossible to make any sense of this formula or the associated “explanation;” either it has been drastically misrendered or it is calculated gibberish—Molière’s science, as it were. The notion that light waves lose energy as they plough through the luminiferous ether seems plausible, on the basis of an analogy with sound waves in air or actual waves on the surface of water, but is somewhat out of keeping with the calculations of stellar distances cited later in the text, which assume the constancy of the velocity of light.
97 Vade mecum [“go with me”] was once used as a flippant general term for all pocket reference books. Les Terres du ciel, of which Les Continents célestes is an obvious analogue, would have made a very inconvenient vade mecum, as it is a very weighty quarto volume.
98 In fact, Venus’s days are very long, equivalent to 243 of ours, and its “year” is only equivalent to 224.7 Earthly days; the former figure was unknown to contemporary astronomers, but there is no reason for Fricoulet to misquote the latter, especially as he is correct in citing the planet’s orbital velocity as 35 kps. Either Graffigny or the authors’ amanuensis must have slipped up.
99 The figure for the axial inclination of Venus given in modern textbooks is 178 degrees, which is only two degrees from the vertical (it is rendered in that fashion because Venus’ south magnetic pole is “above” the ecliptic rather than below it). The datum was very difficult to ascertain by means of optical telescopes because of the obscuring cloud cover, and the highly imaginative “measurements” made by Giovanni Cassini in the 17th century cast a long shadow over subsequent attempts.
100 This calculation seems a trifle odd, since we were told a little while ago that the vehicle was traveling at a little over 100,000 kilometers an hour—but we have also been told that it is decelerating continually as its propulsive force declines.
101 Pietro Tacchini (1838-1905) and Hermann Carl Vogel (1841-1907).
102 A little while ago, it was going to take 40 hours and the point was forcibly made that there was no way to reduce that journey time.
103 T
his reaction is surprising, given that we have just been told that the temperature is 30 degrees Centigrade; the figure might have been misprinted.
104 Théodore Sivel (1834-1875) and Joseph Croce-Spinelli (1845-1875) were asphyxiated while trying to break their own height record for a balloon ascent; they were buried in a common grave at Pére-Lachaise.
105 The amateur William Frederick Denning (1848-1931) is the odd man out in this set, the others being the Italian pioneers Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729) and Giovani Domenico Cassini (1625-1712).
106 The astronomer cited for the first time is Thomas William Webb (1807-1885).
107 Louis Niesten (1844-1920).
108 The controversy relating to the alleged satellite of Venus first observed by Cassini in 1672 and 1686 endured for more than two centuries; it even acquired a name (Neith). Others who reported sighting it included James Short in 1740, Andreas Mayer in 1759, Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1761 and Christian Horrebow in 1768. J. H. Lambert wrote a treatise on the subject in 1777, but glimpses of the supposed satellite became scarcer in the 19th century, when optical instruments improved markedly.
109 Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775-1844) was the professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France, and produced many of the translation used in the French education system. Epaminondas was a notable Theban of the 5th century BC, Themistocles a notable Athenian of the previous century.
110 The reader might feel that the homology of languages is taking the authors’ theory of parallel evolution to a ludicrous extreme, but the notion that the evolution of Earthly languages had followed a rational and determinate pattern was not uncommon at the time. The narrative device was so very convenient for fictitious interplanetary travelers that it was widely adopted in scientific romance and science fiction, along with an understandable nationalistic bias—in George Griffith’s cosmic tour story A Honeymoon in Space (1900), which was probably inspired by the Aventures extraordinaires, the tourists find decadent Martians speaking degraded English, and unhesitatingly attributed that to the fact that English represents the summit of linguistic evolution, much as human form represents the acme of biological evolution.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 69
